Abstract：
In the two-tier macro-femto heterogeneous network, hybrid access is regarded as the most ideal access control approach to mitigating macro-femto cross-tier interference and enhancing overall network performance. However, the implementation of hybrid access is hindered by a lack of incentive market mechanism to motivate private femtocell owners to offer access permissions to macro users. In this paper, we propose a reverse auction framework for access permission transaction between a macrocell operator and multiple femtocell owners to promote hybrid access. Our goal is to maximize social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness of the auction. Since the coverage of multiple femtocells may overlap, we partition each cell to adjust the granularity of access permission availability. We first propose a Vickery-Clarke-Grove (VCG)-based mechanism, which costs the least among all auction mechanisms that produce maximum social welfare. As the VCG mechanism is too time-consuming, we propose two alternative truthful mechanisms, namely, generalized secondprice and suboptimal mechanism. We further extend the auction framework to the scenario where femtocell owners have heterogeneous valuations for access permissions in different locations.

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61702380, 61202393, and 61701216, the CPSF (China Postdoctoral Science Foundation) under Grant No. 2012M521797, the International Cooperation Foundation of Shaanxi Province of China under Grant No. 2013KW01-02, the International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program 2013 under Grant No. 57 funded by the Office of China Postdoctoral Council, and Shenzhen Science, Technology and Innovation Commission Basic Research Project under Grant Nos. JCYJ 20160531190935987 and JCYJ 20160531191011045.

通讯作者: Xiao-Yan Yin
Email: yinxy@nwu.edu.cn

About author: Yan-Jiao Chen received her B.E.degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University,Beijing,in 2010,and Ph.D.degree in computer science and engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,Hong Kong,in 2015.She is currently a professor in Wuhan University,Wuhan.